Speaker 1: Cool Zon Media.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
Speaker 2: your weekly reminder that when the federal government does terrible
Speaker 2: things to people, people can fight back and actually successfully
Speaker 2: have long and successful lives of doing incredible activism. I'm
Speaker 2: your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and this week on the show,
Speaker 2: my guest is Kristen Conger. Hi. How are you? Hi?
Speaker 3: I'm great, so happy to be here.
Speaker 2: You are the host of the podcasts Unladylike and Conspiracy.
Speaker 2: She wrote, You are the former host and forever founder
Speaker 2: of the podcast stuff Mom Never Told You, which is
Speaker 2: how I first heard of you, because it is the
Speaker 2: home of one of my all time favorite returning guests,
Speaker 2: Samantha McVeigh, So I figured you're probably really cool too, Love.
Speaker 1: Samantha and our dear dear dear dear dear dear dear
Speaker 1: dear friend, Bridge Todd.
Speaker 2: That's true, okay, but you are the second Conger we've had. Actually,
Speaker 2: I actually don't even know if I've had Molly Conger
Speaker 2: on the show, but I just like spiritually have had
Speaker 2: Molly Kong on the show. You have okay, great. I
Speaker 2: don't remember things. That's kind of my bit to study
Speaker 2: a new subject every week. It works out fine for
Speaker 2: me anyway. You're the second Conger we got on the show.
Speaker 2: What is a conger? Like a Cooper has made barrels?
Speaker 2: What does a conger have done?
Speaker 3: As far as I know, conger was a shortened version
Speaker 3: from bell conger.
Speaker 2: Oh like you hit bells.
Speaker 3: So I don't know if that meant we made the
Speaker 3: bells or just rang the bell. Whoa, that's something to
Speaker 3: do with bells. And I'm thinking about, you know, just
Speaker 3: reclaiming the bell bell Conger. Maybe I can get Molly
Speaker 3: Conger on board. I don't know.
Speaker 2: I love that I have an entire set of tuned
Speaker 2: bells in my kitchen where normal people keep their instruments
Speaker 2: their dining room.
Speaker 3: I should know how to play them. You know, it's
Speaker 3: in my blood.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah. Also on the show is Sophie. Hi, Sophie,
Speaker 2: you're a producer.
Speaker 3: Hey, magbye, I'm happy to be here.
Speaker 2: This week. We are on a red Scare kick. I've
Speaker 2: been on a red Scare kick for a moment because
Speaker 2: it is a thing that includes way too much of
Speaker 2: my brain space in my waking life. Because there's a
Speaker 2: new red Scare starter, and I thought to myself, why
Speaker 2: not take time to look at an anti red scare
Speaker 2: activist a principle. I'm going to see if you can
Speaker 2: figureut who it is. I have no idea whether you'll
Speaker 2: know this person or not, just literally no idea. A
Speaker 2: principled woman who seemed constitutionally incapable of backing down from
Speaker 2: a fight. She was a pioneering journalist, probably the first
Speaker 2: black woman to own a newspaper in the United States,
Speaker 2: and certainly the first black woman vice presidential candidate in
Speaker 2: US history when she ran for office in nineteen fifty
Speaker 2: two on the Progressive Party ticket. It's not a quiz.
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm asking if you know, but that's just
Speaker 2: literally out of curiosity. I wouldn't have known.
Speaker 3: I wish I knew. She sounds incredible.
Speaker 2: Well, I have good news for you about the next
Speaker 2: two hours of your life, because we're going to talk
Speaker 2: the one the only Charlotta spears bass and I am
Speaker 2: accidentally going to say bass probably several times, and that's
Speaker 2: embarrassing because bass looks like bass.
Speaker 1: I really like the name Charlotta.
Speaker 3: I know, yeah, it's a powerful name.
Speaker 2: Charlotta spears bass like coming out the gate, strong name.
Speaker 2: She is cool as hell and like can't be as
Speaker 2: easily summed up as every like pop history piece that
Speaker 2: I read about her. Some of them are really well done,
Speaker 2: but she has like a lot of articles written about
Speaker 2: her a couple of years ago because of Kamala Harris,
Speaker 2: who she has almost nothing in common with besides identity
Speaker 2: and being vice presidential candidates or whatever, you know.
Speaker 3: But yeah, my question though, is like, how did I
Speaker 3: miss her? It seems like she deserves way more attention.
Speaker 2: I know, I was really surprised because like everything I've
Speaker 2: read is like, oh, yeah, everyone knows about this person,
Speaker 2: and I'm like, I had never I even know a
Speaker 2: lot of the supporting characters in this story, like Marcus
Speaker 2: Garvey's and here, Paul Robison's in here. Yeah, and like
Speaker 2: also just like specifically, black journalism is a thing that's
Speaker 2: really interesting to me, and like the role of newspapers
Speaker 2: and social change, because frankly, old timing newspapers were almost
Speaker 2: more like modern podcasts than they are like modern newspapers,
Speaker 2: because like the line between opinion piece and news was
Speaker 2: a lot blurrier, right, Like it is also in our
Speaker 2: field of.
Speaker 3: Work, you don't say I try to.
Speaker 2: Tell the truth all the time. It's just my truth
Speaker 2: has opinion in it. I straight up don't know how
Speaker 2: well known this person is, right, but as is classic
Speaker 2: for talking about a black person born in the US South,
Speaker 2: maybe maybe the US South Papolios North. She was born
Speaker 2: in the nineteenth century, and so I've therefore read contradictory
Speaker 2: dates about when she was born and where she was born.
Speaker 2: This whole story is going to have more contradictory facts
Speaker 2: from seemingly trustworthy sources than I wish it did. There's
Speaker 2: like multiple people with like PhDs or pedigrees being like, oh,
Speaker 2: blah blah blah this thing, and other people being like
Speaker 2: this other thing, and that's just going to be the
Speaker 2: way it is.
Speaker 3: Interesting.
Speaker 2: Charlotta Amanda Spears was born on Valentine's Day sometime between
Speaker 2: eighteen seventy four and eighteen seventy eight, or why not
Speaker 2: maybe eighteen seventy nine or eighteen eighty eighteen seventy four
Speaker 2: seems like the most likely. So going to go with it.
Speaker 2: I'll probably point out when there's like contradictory stuff, but
Speaker 2: overall I'm doing it like this is my best interpretation. Right.
Speaker 2: She was the sixth of eleven kids, which is both
Speaker 2: a lot of kids and also a oddly or a
Speaker 2: normal number for the time. Her mother was Kate Spears.
Speaker 2: Her father was Hiram Spears, and he was a brain Claire.
Speaker 2: And she was probably born in the bustling city of Sumter,
Speaker 2: South Carolina, which is so bustling and I had never
Speaker 2: heard of it and I had to look it up.
Speaker 3: I'm like, what, it sounds very Confederacy.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, no, absolutely, I mean the Confederacy is you know,
Speaker 2: dead and gone sort of by this point. But yeah,
Speaker 2: Sumter is currently the eighth biggest city in South Carolina,
Speaker 2: so it has that going for it. Hell yeah, it's
Speaker 2: not a big place. It's also possible she was born
Speaker 2: in Little Compton, Rhode Island. I like, how oddly specific
Speaker 2: these two places are and very far away from me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, very different settings.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and she's going to move to Rhode Island, but
Speaker 2: not to Little Compton. So most sources say South Carolina,
Speaker 2: and that's certainly demographically more likely. We're going to talk
Speaker 2: about the Great Migration and stuff like that, but that
Speaker 2: comes fifty years later, and honestly, she's going to be
Speaker 2: part of what causes the Great Migration. By well, I'll
Speaker 2: get into it. I just love how like individual figures,
Speaker 2: like I hate the great man of history theory, but
Speaker 2: instead I love a kind of inverse of that, where
Speaker 2: instead of it being an undifferentiated mob and like social
Speaker 2: conditions that create change, I love how it's like the
Speaker 2: accumulated action of a whole lot of individuals and.
Speaker 3: Groups almost like to be super reductive. It's almost butterfly effectish.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally, which is why I have my giant red
Speaker 2: string board of all of the weird connections between all
Speaker 2: of these people, and it keeps me up at night
Speaker 2: that I don't know all of these connections, and if
Speaker 2: I had a time machine, I would be absurd and
Speaker 2: just do it as a weird historian, not try and
Speaker 2: make the world better like anything like that, and just
Speaker 2: be like, but how'd you know that? Guy?
Speaker 3: Those are the kind of conspiracy theories I think we
Speaker 3: need more of the.
Speaker 2: Like small people who accidentally created big change. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 2: into that. Most sources issues born in South Carolina. That's
Speaker 2: the most likely from my point of view, But the
Speaker 2: Rhode Island claim comes from the library that holds all
Speaker 2: of her papers, so I'll fucking whatever. What I do
Speaker 2: know is that eighteen seventy four to eighteen eighty was
Speaker 2: a rough time to be born a black person in
Speaker 2: the US South or the US North. The Union had
Speaker 2: won the Civil War in eighteen sixty five. I always
Speaker 2: have to include as much context as possible, because I
Speaker 2: always never know things when I go into things. The
Speaker 2: Union had won the Civil War in eighteen sixty five,
Speaker 2: which brought legal chattel slavery to a halt in the
Speaker 2: US and for about ten years during reconstruction, there was
Speaker 2: a flourishing of black economic and political power in the
Speaker 2: US South because that's where the overwhelming majority of black
Speaker 2: people lived. Black politician after black politician was elected, and
Speaker 2: now that it wasn't literally a crime to be literate,
Speaker 2: literacy rates among black people were skyrocketing. Like I am
Speaker 2: not aware of another moment in time where a group
Speaker 2: of people had their literacy rates go up so fast.
Speaker 2: Because it's worth underlining here socialisms. We gonna be talking
Speaker 2: about a black journalist what a threat black literacy was
Speaker 2: to white supremacy. When Nat Turner led a rebellion in
Speaker 2: eighteen thirty one that just had the slavers pissing themselves
Speaker 2: in fear. Just you can't overestimate how much Nat Turner's
Speaker 2: rebellion scared people. Part of what scared people was that
Speaker 2: he was literate, he had read the Bible that he preached,
Speaker 2: and black sailors from the North were smuggling abolitionist texts
Speaker 2: into the South. And in response to Nat Turner's rebellion,
Speaker 2: teaching literacy to enslaved people became illegal. So it was like,
Speaker 2: now you're like, even the white person can get in
Speaker 2: trouble for teaching black people how to read. Before the war,
Speaker 2: only about ten percent of enslaved people were literate. By
Speaker 2: eighteen seventy, the number was twenty percent. By nineteen ten
Speaker 2: it was seventy percent. And so for twelve years you
Speaker 2: have this kind of beautiful thing going on, and then
Speaker 2: in eighteen seventy seven, federal troops are withdrawn and white
Speaker 2: Southern racists reassert their power through Jim Crow laws. And
Speaker 2: that's the time period in which Charlotta was born during
Speaker 2: a beautiful dream that was shattered by powerful bigots. So
Speaker 2: in eighteen ninety four, when she's sixteen or twenty or
Speaker 2: fourteen or something, she's young. Yeah, she moved to Rhode Island,
Speaker 2: unless she was born there in which case. At this point,
Speaker 2: she moved to Providence, Rhode Island.
Speaker 3: Hilarious, and she.
Speaker 2: Went there because her older brother was there. And supposedly,
Speaker 2: I'm going to do so many supposedly as in this
Speaker 2: and I tried to look all of them up because
Speaker 2: I'm weird and obsessive. Supposedly she attended Pembroke College and Providence,
Speaker 2: which is part of Brown University, the Ivy League, which
Speaker 2: was the women's college that was attached to Brown University.
Speaker 2: If this is true, she would have been one of
Speaker 2: the very first black women, and it would throw off
Speaker 2: a lot of the timelines of what I read. It's
Speaker 2: still possible. I still think she did it. I just
Speaker 2: think it throws off people's timelines because Pembrook started teaching.
Speaker 2: It was just kind of a throwaway fact, like, oh,
Speaker 2: and then she went to this Ivy League university as
Speaker 2: like a black girl from the South, and I'm like,
Speaker 2: I fucking need to know more about that. This is
Speaker 2: the eighteen nineties we're talking about, right. Pembrooke started teaching
Speaker 2: women in eighteen ninety two. The first black woman admitted
Speaker 2: to the college wasn't until until nineteen oh one. Ethel
Speaker 2: Tremaine Robinson and she didn't graduate until nineteen oh five,
Speaker 2: so Bass could have attended, but not right away, and
Speaker 2: that's what I assume happened. I think she did about
Speaker 2: a semester there, and this would have been rough. The
Speaker 2: teachers and students were racist as hell. I read some
Speaker 2: about Ethel Tremaine's experiences there. The teachers and students were
Speaker 2: racist as hell. She wouldn't have been allowed to live
Speaker 2: on campus with the white women. So she's allowed to
Speaker 2: come to class, but she's not allowed to socialize or live,
Speaker 2: you know. And there would have been no scholarships available
Speaker 2: to her, which is obviously the kind of like systemic
Speaker 2: oppression that she's going to spend her entire life fighting against.
Speaker 2: I would suspect that her brother paid her way through school.
Speaker 2: Ellis Spears was a businessman who had two restaurants and
Speaker 2: an ice delivery service to his name, just not nothing.
Speaker 3: I'd love to see those menus.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally.
Speaker 3: That it was good.
Speaker 2: Well, then we really find out whether he's from South
Speaker 2: Carolina or.
Speaker 3: Or an island exactly.
Speaker 2: And so she started her newspaper life while she's in
Speaker 2: Providence working for the Providence Watchman, which is a black
Speaker 2: newspaper at the time there, and she's selling ads and subscriptions,
Speaker 2: which I would like to note is truly a noble pastime,
Speaker 2: selling the ads that support media that promote radical ideas,
Speaker 2: which is why to carry on in her legacy, I
Speaker 2: would like, for once we don't usually do this, to
Speaker 2: have products and services that support the show. Interrupted the
Speaker 2: podcast and reback. I had no idea how far into this.
Speaker 2: I was like almost tried to rework my script so
Speaker 2: that that would be at the right time for an
Speaker 2: AD break.
Speaker 1: There's no right time for an AD break.
Speaker 2: There's no wrong time for an AD break. So that
Speaker 2: was smooth, Thank you, thank you. Although I do think
Speaker 2: it's actually kind of it probably brought this up before,
Speaker 2: even like the like radical newspapers of the sixties and
Speaker 2: seventies were selling ads, and like it's kind of a
Speaker 2: thing that people like we kind of whitewashed the radicals
Speaker 2: of the past and sort of like anything that doesn't
Speaker 2: map to like what we would expect or want them
Speaker 2: to do, we tend to try and take out when
Speaker 2: we talk about them. So it took me a while.
Speaker 2: I was surprised when I was like the young Lord's
Speaker 2: like the Puerto Rican radical movement in New York City.
Speaker 2: They sold ads in their newspaper. I'm like, oh, yeah, no,
Speaker 2: because they wanted to print their newspaper, like they didn't
Speaker 2: have big money behind them. The Watchman was a black newspaper,
Speaker 2: And if you've heard almost any episode of the show
Speaker 2: at about the turn of the century, you know that
Speaker 2: newspapers were kind of a big deal at the time.
Speaker 2: The podcasts of their time, as I like to call them,
Speaker 2: although I also sometimes call other things the podcast at
Speaker 2: the time, like street what's the thing where he said
Speaker 2: on a soapbox street soapboxers, I'm just gonna call them
Speaker 2: the street preaching or yeah no, But there's this kind
Speaker 2: of thing where like there's a big thing in the
Speaker 2: early twentieth century before Twitter, everyone would be bored, so
Speaker 2: they just go out to the park and they'd be
Speaker 2: basically like people soapboxing. But soapboxing was kind of a
Speaker 2: comedy act because you had to do infotainment. You had
Speaker 2: to get across your ideas right, but you had to
Speaker 2: do it entertainingly because you have literally other soapboxers all
Speaker 2: around the park and you're competing for an audience. So
Speaker 2: it's like competitive infotainment comedy.
Speaker 3: Oh god, so it was like proto YouTube.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it wasn't podcasts, it was proto YouTube. That's what
Speaker 2: soapboxing was. Your background's like journalist stuff, right, m And like,
Speaker 2: I'm curious. I'm just really interested in how journalism shapes
Speaker 2: ideas and the way that we like view journalism has
Speaker 2: changed so much. The idea of the objective newspaper was
Speaker 2: kind of I have always heard basically invented by the
Speaker 2: New York Times in order to tell newspapers being like,
Speaker 2: ah are the ones who are telling you the truth
Speaker 2: and nothing but the truth? You know. I'm just interested
Speaker 2: in all that stuff.
Speaker 3: I mean, I won't take you down a full journalism
Speaker 3: school tangent, but a full journalism school tangent down that
Speaker 3: old dusty road. I actually majored in newspapers, which is
Speaker 3: sounds like I majored in like horse and buggies. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 3: And it was taught as like a very like you know,
Speaker 3: a noble art of objectivity. But maybe it was just
Speaker 3: getting sold spon con from the New York Times and
Speaker 3: didn't even know it.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's funny, it's like I'll kind of make
Speaker 2: fun of that. But like when I was like a journalist,
Speaker 2: but I'm going to use air quotes because I was
Speaker 2: mostly an activist when I was younger, and I did
Speaker 2: a lot of like video reporting on protests and things
Speaker 2: like that turn of the millennia. Because I'm ancient. We
Speaker 2: always talked about how objectivity is a myth, but we
Speaker 2: kind of did that to like defend our own like
Speaker 2: utter lack of objectivity. And I eventually was like, objectivity
Speaker 2: is kind of a myth, but we should still kind
Speaker 2: of strive for a lot of things that are mythical,
Speaker 2: you know, Like I want to tell you the truth
Speaker 2: when I tell you this story about someone that I
Speaker 2: think is cool, and I also want to be really
Speaker 2: upfront about my biases so that you can analyze what
Speaker 2: I'm saying and say, like, all right, well Margaret thinks
Speaker 2: that because she thinks the following things, right. But I'm
Speaker 2: still going to try, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think I've philosophically like shifted away from, like
Speaker 3: you said, like accepting the myth of objectivity, maybe still
Speaker 3: striving for it, but really like I strive to give
Speaker 3: the context at the very least. Yeah, Yeah, totally, people
Speaker 3: can hang on to.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's like, the only way I can care about
Speaker 2: history is once I understand the things around it, like
Speaker 2: a series of like individual incidents, names and dates and stuff.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, timeline.
Speaker 2: No, yeah, no, that's never gonna I only start caring
Speaker 2: about timeline once I've studied so many things in a
Speaker 2: general area that I can start being like, oh shit,
Speaker 2: that happened in nineteen sixty four. Then that means the
Speaker 2: following thing, you know, mm hmm. But like that's not
Speaker 2: where I'm starting, and that's not where I expect the
Speaker 2: audience to start. That's why I like my podcasts is
Speaker 2: that they admit that also, our goal is to keep
Speaker 2: people entertained, which is why I'm sure this meta conversation
Speaker 2: is totally entertaining to you, the listener. And so though
Speaker 2: these black newspapers all over the country, and it's a
Speaker 2: really important part of the network of emancipation that people
Speaker 2: are building of liberation, like literally one of them is
Speaker 2: called the Liberator, although that one is funny, I think,
Speaker 2: oh lord, that one actually was in the eighteen sixties
Speaker 2: and it was actually run by a white man, but
Speaker 2: it was considered a black newspaper because all of its
Speaker 2: readership was black. And most of the people doing the
Speaker 2: other stuff were black, but it was being financed by
Speaker 2: a like rich white abolitionist. One day, I'm going to
Speaker 2: do more about The Liberator. I only read a paragraph
Speaker 2: about it while doing this episode, and then I didn't
Speaker 2: put it in the script. Anyway, she worked not for
Speaker 2: the Liberator. She worked for the Watchman, which is a
Speaker 2: good name for a paper. They had cool names for
Speaker 2: papers back then. Soon we're going to talk about a
Speaker 2: paper called the Owl, and I'm really into it. So
Speaker 2: she worked for ten years for this place, and I
Speaker 2: can't find too much information about that specific paper, which
Speaker 2: makes me sad. But Charlotta Bass wasn't thriving in Providence.
Speaker 2: It was cold and it was humid, and she had
Speaker 2: asthma and arthritis, which is going to make her career
Speaker 2: as a writer extra impressive, I must say, because not
Speaker 2: a time of keyboards that are easy on the joints.
Speaker 2: So she said, what if I go where it's warm
Speaker 2: and dry? What if I moved to a city you
Speaker 2: all might have ever heard of, Los Angeles, California, So
Speaker 2: ify that one's for you, because I know you like
Speaker 2: Los Angeles, California.
Speaker 1: Yeah, born and raised baby, This is a whole story
Speaker 1: about your city. It's literally the shortest section in the
Speaker 1: script Los Angeles, the California section.
Speaker 2: Oh, but I'm going to be talking about a whole
Speaker 2: neighborhood that used to exist. I'm going to talk about
Speaker 2: the red lining. I'm going to talk about the Highway ten,
Speaker 2: which is a highway that I totally know. It is freeway.
Speaker 2: It's the tenth one. It's the tenth Freeway.
Speaker 1: We don't have highways. They're free with.
Speaker 2: Okay, are you Caddy Corner or Kitty Corner?
Speaker 1: I'm Kitty Corner.
Speaker 2: What about you, Kristen? What's where you're at?
Speaker 3: I'm Caddy Corner. I'm so sorry, I've got to leave
Speaker 3: this zoom.
Speaker 2: I think I'm Caddy Corner. No, I'm Kitty Corner. I
Speaker 2: grew up on those maps. I grew up on the
Speaker 2: one where we don't have a name for this. It's
Speaker 2: what I grew up with.
Speaker 3: It's okay.
Speaker 1: I get outed as being from California and Oregon all
Speaker 1: the time because in California we call freeways like it
Speaker 1: would be like the five, Yeah, the four or five,
Speaker 1: and they don't do that here, and they're like, it's
Speaker 1: the I five and you get judged for being interesting.
Speaker 2: I wrote a story where the characters go down I
Speaker 2: five and I said, like, they went down the five,
Speaker 2: or maybe I said went down the I five. And
Speaker 2: my Oregon editor was like, we don't call that here,
Speaker 2: and I'm like, I lived there for six years. I've
Speaker 2: hitchhiked on that road. It's the only state where you're
Speaker 2: allowed to. I feel as though I can call it this.
Speaker 2: This is totally what people are listening to this far.
Speaker 2: So Charlotta Bass moves to Los Angeles, California. This is
Speaker 2: the very beginning of what's called the Great Migration, when
Speaker 2: black people fled the South in incredible numbers. She's not
Speaker 2: fleeing the South, she's leaving New England. But there's a
Speaker 2: sort of internal diaspora to escape Jim Crow and to
Speaker 2: seek out a better life either up north or out west.
Speaker 2: And one of the reasons that it was good for
Speaker 2: people out west one of the reasons among many, but
Speaker 2: one of my little things that butterflied out was a
Speaker 2: black newspaper from Los Angeles called The Owl. Yes later
Speaker 2: it's going to be called the California Eagle. It has
Speaker 2: gone by a bunch of names, and I have seen
Speaker 2: it both called the owl, the California Owl, the eagle,
Speaker 2: and the California Eagle.
Speaker 3: Love that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I believe it was called the owl and then
Speaker 2: became the eagle, and then became the California Eagle, and
Speaker 2: it was never the California Owl. But I don't know,
Speaker 2: and I've read all four. But it's a sick name,
Speaker 2: the owl. I get really sad when people have the
Speaker 2: sick name and they change it to the normal name.
Speaker 2: The Eagle's fine, not mad at the eagle rolls off
Speaker 2: the tongue a little easier.
Speaker 3: It's a little Republican coded.
Speaker 1: I'm yeah, you're patriotic, exactly exactly.
Speaker 2: CHRISTI yeah, totally.
Speaker 3: Oh.
Speaker 2: I wonder how much that has changed, whether like yeah,
Speaker 2: who knows. Anyway, For the last fifty years of the
Speaker 2: existence of this paper, which was around for twenty one
Speaker 2: and a half confederacies, which is how I measure lengths
Speaker 2: of time, for the last fifty years of this paper,
Speaker 2: it was the California Eagle. So I'm gonna mostly call
Speaker 2: it that, even though it's the least fun of the
Speaker 2: three names. The Owl slash California Eagle was established in
Speaker 2: eighteen seventy nine, and it lasted until nineteen sixty four,
Speaker 2: eighty five years twenty one times the Confederacy. It was
Speaker 2: started by a bl black man who'd moved from Texas
Speaker 2: to Los Angeles, actually honestly a black kid who moved
Speaker 2: from Texas to Los Angeles, John James Neimour, and it
Speaker 2: became an important black voice in California. I don't know
Speaker 2: as much about him as I would like, but he
Speaker 2: was born in Texas to black farmers. That's what everything says.
Speaker 2: If he was born in the early eighteen sixties. He
Speaker 2: was not born to black farmers. He was born to
Speaker 2: black enslaved farm workers. And people love leaving things like
Speaker 2: that out of stories. And then somehow or another, he
Speaker 2: got himself to California to start a groundbreaking newspaper when
Speaker 2: he was sixteen or seventeen years old. Wow, I don't
Speaker 2: know what the fuck you were doing when he was
Speaker 2: sixteen not that. Yeah, totally wasting time. Yeah, this man
Speaker 2: started his life project when he was sixteen or seventeen
Speaker 2: years old. And I love these moments of outsized results
Speaker 2: for small actions. I can't prove the cause and effect
Speaker 2: specifically about the Great Migration in this but John James
Speaker 2: Nimore started the OWL specifically to help people leaving the
Speaker 2: South to find a new home in California. And since
Speaker 2: the Great Migration was one of the most important demographic
Speaker 2: shifts in US history, it's had this enormous impact on
Speaker 2: US culture, and so on some level, the OWL helped
Speaker 2: make that happen. Even though it started thirty years before
Speaker 2: the Great Migration, it started making it easier for people
Speaker 2: to come out to California. California ended up being I
Speaker 2: read a bunch of different quotes and I didn't end
Speaker 2: up putting any of them in my script, And I
Speaker 2: don't know why. I read a bunch of different quotes
Speaker 2: from different thinkers talking about like, look, California is the
Speaker 2: nicest place to be black in the United States of America.
Speaker 2: Is what people were saying at various points in like
Speaker 2: the nineteen tens, nineteen twenties.
Speaker 3: Like any specific reason, like why California Now.
Speaker 2: I think that's why it ended up in the script,
Speaker 2: as I was like, that was like one of those
Speaker 2: things where I was like, I need to learn more
Speaker 2: about that, and I didn't. But I assume Jim Crow
Speaker 2: had the least reach. I assume kind of a like
Speaker 2: a little bit of like the wild West vibe, but
Speaker 2: like with cities, you know, I assume it's the kind
Speaker 2: of the combination of those two factors, because the when
Speaker 2: sometimes when you're on like the frontier, even though that's
Speaker 2: like a land of a lot of racist shit, there's
Speaker 2: also like more permissiveness for like breaking social boundaries, right, yes, yeah,
Speaker 2: And I've read a lot of like, oh crap, it's
Speaker 2: been years since I did this. There was a black
Speaker 2: trans woman who ran a brothel and did a whole
Speaker 2: bunch of crazy shit out in California and was like
Speaker 2: doing all kinds of awesome stuff and I cannot remember
Speaker 2: her name or what she did.
Speaker 3: Ah crap, she sounds cool, magpie.
Speaker 1: To be fair, you don't remember most people's names, and
Speaker 1: that's fine.
Speaker 2: That's true. I actually, if I spend enough time alone,
Speaker 2: every living object that is not me is named Rintraw
Speaker 2: after my dog. Yeah, by accident. So I'll like shoe
Speaker 2: a spider out of my house and be like, get
Speaker 2: out if you're intra and then I'm like, my friends
Speaker 2: will come of anyway. I'm totally normal. But yeah, so
Speaker 2: California was a place I am suspecting that would be
Speaker 2: my guess this combination of like urban living is usually
Speaker 2: much better for minorities, but also sometimes frontier societies are
Speaker 2: also a place with more permissiveness of social mobility, which
Speaker 2: plays really complicatedly into colonialism, right, because a lot of
Speaker 2: the colonists, like for example, the Japanese colonists who came
Speaker 2: over to Korea and were a horrible colonizing force in
Speaker 2: Korea for many years, were the people who couldn't make
Speaker 2: it in Japan, and so they were doing something like
Speaker 2: edgy and cool by going and becoming colonial assholes in Korea.
Speaker 2: And it's like the similar thing that Britain did and
Speaker 2: the US did. It's just like a pattern, and so
Speaker 2: the frontier is always like a complicated place. That's my
Speaker 2: best guess. In eighteen eighty five, LA was only about
Speaker 2: one percent black. The two largest minority groups were Chinese
Speaker 2: and Japanese, and when people got there they could count
Speaker 2: on the OWL to help them find out about housing
Speaker 2: and jobs, and I believe it ran also articles specifically
Speaker 2: about how to help people find their way in a
Speaker 2: new city. I've also seen it described as a paper
Speaker 2: that's specifically focused on telling positive stories about black people,
Speaker 2: which rules because alongside honest descriptions of the problems of
Speaker 2: the world. I think it's well, it's literally my podcast.
Speaker 2: It's very important to hold up positive stories as well,
Speaker 2: and it was a very short paper. It was a
Speaker 2: four page tabloid. I am guessing it came out weekly,
Speaker 2: but I could not tell you. Nimour was also involved
Speaker 2: in the early years of the first Black Baptist church
Speaker 2: anywhere in southern California, Second Baptist, which was found in
Speaker 2: eighteen eighty five. I believe it's still around today, as
Speaker 2: we've covered a lot in the show, but it's always
Speaker 2: worth repeating for context. Black churches were crucial parts of
Speaker 2: early Black liberation movements, and so helping getting this thing
Speaker 2: going was another rather important accomplishment on his part. This
Speaker 2: particular church, Second Baptist W. E. B. Du Bois, spoke there.
Speaker 2: He's one of the people who had a quote about
Speaker 2: California that I didn't write into the script. The minister's
Speaker 2: son was the director of the La ANDAACP MLKA Junior
Speaker 2: preached there in nineteen sixty eight, just three weeks before
Speaker 2: he was murdered. But unfortunately for the world, Neimour's health
Speaker 2: wasn't the best and he died young in nineteen twelve,
Speaker 2: at fifty years old. People at the time seemed to
Speaker 2: describe it as he worked himself to death. Here is
Speaker 2: one of the problems with being a self starting journalist.
Speaker 3: When you start your life's work at sixteen.
Speaker 2: Well, it was like I always thought I was really
Speaker 2: lazy as a kid, and it just turns out I
Speaker 2: don't like working for other people, but as soon as
Speaker 2: I'm in charge of my own thing, I will work
Speaker 2: instead of anything that I should be doing for my health.
Speaker 2: So Charlotta Bass had been working there for a year
Speaker 2: or two at that point. She started by basically when
Speaker 2: she first moved to California. I actually think she wasn't
Speaker 2: trying to stay there. I think she was trying to
Speaker 2: do that thing that like people used to do in
Speaker 2: old timing days, where they're like, it's better for my
Speaker 2: health to go to a nicer climate, and I'm going
Speaker 2: to go there for a couple of years and recover
Speaker 2: and then come back, you know. But she was like,
Speaker 2: but I'm not a rich person doing that in Victoria
Speaker 2: in England, so I need a job. And so she
Speaker 2: started working at this newspaper, I believe, selling ads and
Speaker 2: presumably subscriptions, and I think maybe became kind of editor
Speaker 2: as Nymour got sick. I think it was mostly a
Speaker 2: one man show before that, but I am not sure.
Speaker 2: It's my inference. And on his deathbed, Nymore extracted a
Speaker 2: promise from her to keep his paper alive. Just such
Speaker 2: a dramatic scene to imagine, right, But the catch was
Speaker 2: he didn't own his newspaper. She bought the paper at
Speaker 2: auction for fifty dollars after his death. Niymour didn't own
Speaker 2: the paper. A creepy white dude did no. And the
Speaker 2: creepy white dude was like, oh, yeah, sure, you can
Speaker 2: keep running the paper. You just have to fuck me.
Speaker 2: And she was like, I am not going to fuck you.
Speaker 2: So instead she went to a Again this is my
Speaker 2: inference here, she went to crime and organized fifty dollars
Speaker 2: from crime. From a second hand story, I believe she
Speaker 2: went to a pawn shop and said, give me a
Speaker 2: sketchy business loan, sketchy loan, shark, I would like to
Speaker 2: buy this business and they were like, yeah, okay, here's
Speaker 2: fifty bucks, which is about seventeen hundred dollars today, and
Speaker 2: bought the paper at auction because the guy who owned
Speaker 2: it didn't pulled on to it. He didn't give a
Speaker 2: shit about it, right, he sold at auction. She bought it.
Speaker 2: She didn't have to fuck him, And at thirty six
Speaker 2: years old, she became the first black American woman to
Speaker 2: own her own newspaper by like being like smart and fierce.
Speaker 3: And that also says something like the extent to which
Speaker 3: she is going to carry through this deathbed promise.
Speaker 2: Yeah, she's amazing. Like at some point I think in
Speaker 2: the next episode, I think she's going to drive off
Speaker 2: eight members of the KKK with a handgun. Hell yeaes
Speaker 2: And she buys this newspaper, and local black leaders I
Speaker 2: assume these are all men, show up and are like,
Speaker 2: you can't do this, and they think they'd be nice
Speaker 2: to her. They're like, look, if a man works himself
Speaker 2: to death trying to make this work, you shouldn't even try.
Speaker 2: I mean for your own health and well being. That
Speaker 2: clearly didn't stop her, But do you know what can
Speaker 2: stop this story? For approximately four minutes? Good Lord, thank you? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Is it less than that? I actually don't remember how
Speaker 2: long the ads are. I really hope not two minutes.
Speaker 2: I don't know. It's the ads they can stop the
Speaker 2: flow of this podcast by are you talking? Andrew Beck?
Speaker 2: So now she's trying to run a newspaper all by herself.
Speaker 2: That is actually really hard to do. Do you ever
Speaker 2: end up actually working in news after you majored in it? No,
Speaker 2: I think this is very common.
Speaker 3: I worked at the college newspaper and then yeah, that
Speaker 3: was it. Yeah, and then I got into digital.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're like one of the earlier on the scene podcasters.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, I'm a thousand years old.
Speaker 2: Sorry, I'm not trying to I think you're about my age.
Speaker 2: I'm not trying to like put you on a spot anywhere.
Speaker 3: And I don't know why I'm blushing. Yes, I've been
Speaker 3: podcasting since two thousand and nine, which is too long.
Speaker 2: I hope I make it that long too. I know
Speaker 2: that I need help making podcasts. I ran a podcast
Speaker 2: all by myself for a while and it sucked. And
Speaker 2: that's why I'm glad Sophie is my producer. Hey, and
Speaker 2: she was like, I need a Sophie. She was like,
Speaker 2: I need someone to run the business side of this.
Speaker 2: Even though she knows how to run the business side,
Speaker 2: she just doesn't want to do it all by herself,
Speaker 2: so she needs a managing editor, so by nineteen thirteen
Speaker 2: she recruited a black newspaper man from Kansas with a
Speaker 2: also kind of sick name. I think both of these
Speaker 2: people have pretty sick names. Joseph Blackburn Bass. And he
Speaker 2: ran the Topeka Plane Speaker, which is another sick name
Speaker 2: for a newspaper, the plane Speaker. It's a double not
Speaker 2: on toendre but it's a double meaning it's on the
Speaker 2: planes and they're speaking in plain language. Brilliant, A plus
Speaker 2: ten out of ten. He shows up, he leaves the
Speaker 2: Plane Speaker and becomes her managing editor, and if you
Speaker 2: can't tell by his last name, they soon get married.
Speaker 2: And one of the reasons I like their relationship is
Speaker 2: most of the time on this show, I cover some
Speaker 2: man who did something really important, and then about three
Speaker 2: quarters of the way through reading like this or that biography,
Speaker 2: it's like, oh yeah, and he was like married, and
Speaker 2: she did all the same stuff he did and did
Speaker 2: literally as much work as he did, and we just
Speaker 2: don't bother. I'm not even gonna put her name in
Speaker 2: this book. Why would I give you that? You know,
Speaker 2: this is a nice reversal of that, because he did
Speaker 2: all of this shit too, and no one remembers him.
Speaker 2: He was her co editor. They were like equals. They
Speaker 2: ran it as a partnership. Everything I've read implies that
Speaker 2: like she was kind of like, you know, like maybe
Speaker 2: a little bit more of the like pants of the
Speaker 2: family around it, right like m hmmhich is a weird,
Speaker 2: horrible gendered phrase that I grew up with. But you know,
Speaker 2: everything leaves him out in order to do the great
Speaker 2: women of history theory.
Speaker 3: Hey, she bought the paper, she got that sketchy loan,
Speaker 3: and she got the paper.
Speaker 2: I know she got it done. He showed up and
Speaker 2: helped her do it. And you know he worked there
Speaker 2: for twenty one years until he died in nineteen thirty four.
Speaker 2: They were a power couple doing the hard work for
Speaker 2: which she gets all the credit. And the thing I
Speaker 2: like about it, I don't think he would have mind
Speaker 2: it at all. No, Like I think I'm going to
Speaker 2: have him as one of the great wife guys of
Speaker 2: history who had no problem being overshadowed by his wife.
Speaker 2: Under new ownership, the paper really found its voice. It
Speaker 2: probably became the California Eagle. At this point it was
Speaker 2: probably the Eagle already by that point. Ah, but if
Speaker 2: it had been the California Owl, how history would have changed.
Speaker 2: It never would have gone away. People would have been like,
Speaker 2: that's such a sick title. It became a twenty page
Speaker 2: weekly paper instead of a four page tabloid. And I
Speaker 2: think for a long time she's writing the whole damn thing.
Speaker 2: What I think. I know she's doing a lot of
Speaker 2: the writing. I've seen it as the majority of the writing.
Speaker 2: I don't know to what degree they're hiring people. Actually,
Speaker 2: I do know by the nineteen twenties they had editors
Speaker 2: and stuff working with them, so it's possible that by
Speaker 2: the time they built up to this level they have employees.
Speaker 2: And they take the paper very political. I think the
Speaker 2: paper had always been political by simply existing, but she
Speaker 2: became to focus it more on activist fight after activist fight,
Speaker 2: one of the main things that they get credit for.
Speaker 2: I thought, ask if you've ever seen but I haven't
Speaker 2: actually seen it. You know, the film Birth of a
Speaker 2: Nation from nineteen fifteen.
Speaker 3: I do, and I have not seen it either.
Speaker 2: I feel like I should hate watch it. At some point.
Speaker 2: I just can't bring myself to do that to myself
Speaker 2: with an evening.
Speaker 3: You know, it seems really boring too. I don't know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's true, like anything from nineteen fifteen is
Speaker 2: going to be boring to watch now, but extra boring
Speaker 2: if you're like, I just hate all these people. There
Speaker 2: was a racist film called Birth of a Nation. It
Speaker 2: came out nineteen fifteen. It is like literally one of
Speaker 2: the masterpieces of just racist cinema that like went on
Speaker 2: to inspire the Nazis and just is terrible. I have
Speaker 2: nothing nice to say about it. It also is the
Speaker 2: reason that KKK came back. And when it came out
Speaker 2: in nineteen fifteen, the California Eagle was probably the first
Speaker 2: paper to be, like, whoa the fuck y'all say this
Speaker 2: terrible thing. It probably didn't phrase it that way. I
Speaker 2: don't know how much they cust or didn't cuss. Most
Speaker 2: people don't cuss when they write newspapers. This is why
Speaker 2: I can't run a newspaper. And so black newspapers all
Speaker 2: over the country started a campaign to get this movie
Speaker 2: shut down and get it canceled out of various movie theaters,
Speaker 2: and they did not entirely successfully, but a lot of
Speaker 2: movie theaters canceled their showings and they limited the spread
Speaker 2: of this propaganda, sometimes by people throwing bricks through windows
Speaker 2: and responding to a movie you don't like by smashing
Speaker 2: out the windows of the theater may seem extreme, but
Speaker 2: this movie is, as I said, one of the greatest
Speaker 2: pieces of white supremacist culture ever created. It's a celebration
Speaker 2: of the original ku Klux Klan is directly responsible for
Speaker 2: the rebirth of that organization, the second era of the KKK,
Speaker 2: which is much larger than the original one and was
Speaker 2: basically like a cultural institution and kind of a multi
Speaker 2: level marketing scheme, which I learned about from Behind the Bastards.
Speaker 2: Never heard of it, Sophy, I think you'd like it.
Speaker 2: There's another podcast called Behind the Bastards. It's on the
Speaker 2: same network, and they covered the KKK. It's like the
Speaker 2: reverse of this show. It's like an uncool people did
Speaker 2: uncool stuff, which is a ridiculous concept for a podcast,
Speaker 2: but there you go, totally. And the Klan wasn't happy
Speaker 2: about what she did. They hated this woman. They spent
Speaker 2: years after her. In nineteen twenty five, she got a
Speaker 2: hold of an internal memo of the California KKK that
Speaker 2: had a plot to frame three black leaders for drinking
Speaker 2: and driving. Like it was like, we're gonna sneak in
Speaker 2: and put it at a half empty bottle of gin
Speaker 2: in their car and then get them to crash, and
Speaker 2: then everyone's gonna think black people are irresponsible and everyone's
Speaker 2: gonna become racists and talk like this what dorks? Yeah,
Speaker 2: and someone like the unspoken part of this, someone leaked
Speaker 2: that shit to her.
Speaker 3: I think, like someone from the KKK.
Speaker 2: I don't know how she got the letter, right, I,
Speaker 2: you know, unless she's going through their mail. I think
Speaker 2: someone was like.
Speaker 3: Maybe one of them was like this is such a
Speaker 3: stupid plan.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally, it's just yeah, leak it. Yeah. So she
Speaker 2: gets a hold of this internal memo from nineteen twenty
Speaker 2: five and she publishes it in the newspaper, and it's
Speaker 2: like this is what the KKK is trying to do.
Speaker 2: And what's important to understand is that the KKK in
Speaker 2: this point time, they're like legitimate, you like, you know,
Speaker 2: it's like perfectly legal. It's not like it's not the
Speaker 2: like later nineteen forties nineteen fifties where you're like hiding
Speaker 2: your clan robes in the closet. This is like upstanding
Speaker 2: business people. Right, this is like good old family whiteness
Speaker 2: or whatever, as long as we all hate black people
Speaker 2: and also other minorities, including Catholics for some odd reason.
Speaker 2: Like and she's like, look at these pieces of shit
Speaker 2: and publishes this. So the KKK sue her, the California
Speaker 2: branch sue her from libel, and it was a criminal complaint.
Speaker 2: She was facing a year in prison. She wrote, quote,
Speaker 2: if to jail, we must go for publishing without malice
Speaker 2: such propaganda as we, in common with all fair minded citizens,
Speaker 2: believe prejudicial to good government. We go with a smile.
Speaker 2: We go forward, unafraid, as we continue our steady march
Speaker 2: for law and order, fighting every inch of the way
Speaker 2: all things which retard our progress. So like, also she
Speaker 2: could write I'm saying yeah, and she lost the case
Speaker 2: in front of an all white court. I'm sorry, oh sorry,
Speaker 2: the Klan. This is an important distinction. The clan is
Speaker 2: a terrible reversal. They lost their case in front of
Speaker 2: an all white court. Punkass because their argument was like,
Speaker 2: we didn't write that, and they're like, yeah, you fucking
Speaker 2: wrote that, and that's also that's not libel. Yeah, And
Speaker 2: so the KKK they kept sending her threatening letters with
Speaker 2: lots of nwords in them for some weird reason. They
Speaker 2: didn't know they're not supposed to say that it's white people.
Speaker 2: They like threatened her for years, and at one point
Speaker 2: they like showed up and she like looks out, like
Speaker 2: it's like a storefront kind of thing's got like full
Speaker 2: play glass windows to the office. She like looks out
Speaker 2: and there's like eight fucking clansmen outside, and so she's
Speaker 2: just like, God, I got a gun around here somewhere,
Speaker 2: like finds a gun. She does not shoot it. She
Speaker 2: just pulls out a gun and like walks towards the window,
Speaker 2: and they're like, oh, we're good, and they all leave.
Speaker 3: She's probably on deadline. She has an entire paper to
Speaker 3: write herself.
Speaker 2: He's like like, please, and I have slept in two days.
Speaker 2: I'm a fucking with you and I love okay. There's
Speaker 2: a following back and forth that is quoted by La
Speaker 2: mag And this is from a husband. This is a
Speaker 2: marital conversation quote missus Bass, one of these days you're
Speaker 2: going to get me killed. Her husband and co editor
Speaker 2: Joseph Bass, would often say, mister Bass, it will be
Speaker 2: in a good cause. She'd reply, he.
Speaker 3: Is an epic wife guy.
Speaker 2: You know, he's just like, ah, here we go again.
Speaker 2: I married a badass.
Speaker 3: Oh, I love her, but she was going to get
Speaker 3: me killed. Yeah.
Speaker 2: The paper also argued against segregation of the US military,
Speaker 2: which famously they had to do twice during both World
Speaker 2: Wars because, shamefully, even as the United States military was
Speaker 2: invading Germany for being racist, they did so as racistly
Speaker 2: as they could. By nineteen twenty five, they had a
Speaker 2: circulation of sixty thousand, making it the most read black
Speaker 2: paper in California. Here's a thing where I've read a
Speaker 2: whole lot of different things in various directions. Later, the
Speaker 2: circulation numbers near the end in the nineteen fifties are
Speaker 2: going to be much lower than that. I've also read
Speaker 2: that the Topeka Plain Dealer, the one that her husband left,
Speaker 2: was the most read black newspaper west of the Mississippi,
Speaker 2: but I am skeptical of it out selling the Eagle,
Speaker 2: so that might have been before he left. I don't know.
Speaker 2: She had a weekly column called on the Sidewalk, which
Speaker 2: she used to talk about the need for civil rights,
Speaker 2: not just for black Americans. She constantly spoke up for
Speaker 2: like every ethnic minority in the United States. She talked
Speaker 2: a lot about the Latino community. There was some stuff
Speaker 2: that I eventually want to get into more when I
Speaker 2: learn more about it, where there was like a big
Speaker 2: roundup of like Mexican American teenage boys after a murderer,
Speaker 2: and they were like all being blamed or whatever, like
Speaker 2: hundreds of them or whatever the fuck, you know, So
Speaker 2: she writes about that. She in World War Two, she
Speaker 2: is one of the few people speaking out for an
Speaker 2: end of the Japanese internment camps. And in nineteen thirty
Speaker 2: The Eagle published their own editorial platform for everyone to see,
Speaker 2: and I'm just going to read it. Good platform. Their
Speaker 2: interests are quote the hiring of Negroes as a matter
Speaker 2: of right rather than as a concession in those institutions
Speaker 2: where their patronage creates a demand for labor. The increased
Speaker 2: participation of Negroes and municipal, state, and national government. The
Speaker 2: abolition of enforced segregation and all other artificial barriers to
Speaker 2: the recognition of merit, the patronized of Negroes by Negroes
Speaker 2: as a matter of principle, more rapid development of those
Speaker 2: communities in which Negroes live by cooperation between citizens and
Speaker 2: those who have business investments in such communities, and an
Speaker 2: enthusiastic support for a greater degree of service at the
Speaker 2: hands of all social, civic, charitable and religious organizations. And
Speaker 2: so they're like, this is what we believe. If there's
Speaker 2: a black business, if there's a business that relies on
Speaker 2: black customers, it should hire black people, and that black people,
Speaker 2: like we should be buying from stores that don't refuse
Speaker 2: to sell whatever basic shit. And because of this radical stance,
Speaker 2: she is going to spend thirty years being investigated by
Speaker 2: the FBI.
Speaker 3: For this platform.
Speaker 2: The newspaper in its stances m h are what she's
Speaker 2: going to be investigated for. But what's going to I'll
Speaker 2: probably end up saying this again later in the script.
Speaker 2: But one of the things that's neat funny bad Bad's
Speaker 2: the word is that some of the FBI agents who
Speaker 2: are like following her keep writing and being like, hey, boss,
Speaker 2: she's not a communist. She says what she believes every
Speaker 2: single week. We can read what she believes. This is
Speaker 2: what she believes, And Jagger Hoover's like, not keep following her.
Speaker 2: It's gonna slip. She's a communist. So it's like, this
Speaker 2: is what she's after, right, She's very clear about it.
Speaker 2: She doesn't have any problem with communists. That's also going
Speaker 2: to come up because also in a real credit where
Speaker 2: credit is due weigh whenever I'm talking about civil rights
Speaker 2: in America before the civil rights movement, whenever we're talking
Speaker 2: about like the nineteen twenties and thirties in particular, the
Speaker 2: Communist Party is left out of the history because of
Speaker 2: the red Scare right. The Communist Party was perhaps the
Speaker 2: single most influential racially mixed organization fighting for black rights
Speaker 2: in the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties in the United States.
Speaker 2: So a great deal of the people of all races
Speaker 2: who are fighting for the same things as she was,
Speaker 2: were committed card carrying communists. She just wasn't. And like
Speaker 2: most of the media people we've covered on the show,
Speaker 2: she was not afraid of new media. She started podcasting,
Speaker 2: but on the radio, so backwards podcasting whatever they call that,
Speaker 2: I don't know, whatever you call radio podcasting. She did
Speaker 2: it six nights a week starting in nineteen thirty eight.
Speaker 2: They ran a fifteen minute news show that they called
Speaker 2: a newspaper of the air. Isn't it great?
Speaker 3: It's kind of whimsical.
Speaker 2: I love it, I know. And then by nineteen forty
Speaker 2: they had the California Eagle Hour on Sundays on a
Speaker 2: different radio station. It still Republican, even more Republicans. The
Speaker 2: California Eagle Hour. You know, that's the where you want
Speaker 2: to go to for news. What about the Owl Hour?
Speaker 3: I'll take the Owl Hour?
Speaker 2: What if it was our Owl Hour, like the one
Speaker 2: that belongs to us, our Owl Hour?
Speaker 3: Welcome to our Owl Hour.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's how they can figure out who's good and
Speaker 2: at the radio podcasting. In order to do it is
Speaker 2: that they can say all our.
Speaker 3: It's gonna be my next podcast.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah. But then she faced terrible repression, but she's
Speaker 2: going to survive and fight back against and we're going
Speaker 2: to talk about it on Wednesday. But first, one, if
Speaker 2: you have any thoughts about this, I want to hear
Speaker 2: them in Two, how can people hear more of what
Speaker 2: you do?
Speaker 3: Well? One, thank you for introducing me to this incredible
Speaker 3: woman and her incredible unnamed husband.
Speaker 2: I know I just say is yeah, but yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: oh you did. I've already forgotten blackburns in the middle anymore.
Speaker 2: I don't even remember the first name. But okay, when
Speaker 2: Blackburn's in your name, that's what I'm remembering. I can
Speaker 2: only remember one name per person.
Speaker 3: Incredible story. I can't wait to find out what happens next.
Speaker 3: If people want to listen to my podcast, just look
Speaker 3: for unladylike and can conspiracy. She wrote, Yeah, I just
Speaker 3: talk a lot about like women and gender and trying
Speaker 3: to make sense of this this kooky old world. The
Speaker 3: front of the pod.
Speaker 1: Bridget Todd has a new audiobook out and it is
Speaker 1: called Love at First prompt AI in the Future of Intimacy.
Speaker 2: And don't worry. It's not going to convince you to
Speaker 2: run out and get an AI girlfriend.
Speaker 1: No, No, this is trusted source friends.
Speaker 3: If there's anyone I trust yeah to tell me about
Speaker 3: AI girlfriends, I do need to listen to this. It
Speaker 3: is Bridget for sure.
Speaker 2: I kind of feel like it's like she's like the
Speaker 2: only person I would trust with this story.
Speaker 3: One.
Speaker 2: Yeah, even the people I know and trust on the
Speaker 2: like anti AI AI front, I like don't know if
Speaker 2: I trust their like empathy around understanding complicated things, you know,
Speaker 2: mm hmm. Anyway, Well, next, when this Wednesday, this very Wednesday,
Speaker 2: talking about the rids and in the meantime, don't throw
Speaker 2: each other under the bus, learn from history, stand up
Speaker 2: against red scares, and take care of each other.
Speaker 3: Cool People Who.
Speaker 1: Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 1: Goolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the five
Speaker 1: or radio app, hop a Podcasts, or wherever you get
Speaker 1: your podcasts.